Approach
The title of the book refers to a self-description by Smith, "I a rough stone. The sound of the hammer and chisel was never heard on me nor never will be. I desire the learning and wisdom of heaven alone." Bushman is the author of many books on early American cultural and religious history, and his own religious and academic background enables him to locate Joseph Smith in the cultural context of early nineteenth-century America.
Although the five-hundred eighty-four page biography (with additional extensive notes and documentation) does not avoid controversial aspects of Smith's life and work, such as his practice of polygamy and his youthful treasure-seeking, it treats them cautiously, and as Bushman himself admits, with "greater tolerance for Smith's remarkable stories than most historians would allow." Rough Stone Rolling makes use of much recent research and is the most complete biography of Joseph Smith published to date.
Read more about this topic: Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling
Famous quotes containing the word approach:
“There is no calm philosophy of life here, such as you might put at the end of the Almanac, to hang over the farmer’s hearth,—how men shall live in these winter, in these summer days. No philosophy, properly speaking, of love, or friendship, or religion, or politics, or education, or nature, or spirit; perhaps a nearer approach to a philosophy of kingship, and of the place of the literary man, than of anything else.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... the ordinary is simply the universal observed from the surface, that the direct approach to reality is not without, but within. Touch life anywhere ... and you will touch universality wherever you touch the earth.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)
“Saints are simply men & women who have fulfilled their natural obligation which is to approach God.”
—Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966)